The Chosen

In a way I feel like Danny in the book "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok. His father refused to speak to him for many years and explained before Danny would leave home:

"My father himself never talked to me, except when we studied together. He taught me with silence. He taught me to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. . . . One learns of the pain of others by suffering one's own pain, he would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one's own soul. And it is important to know of pain, he said. It destroys our self-pride, our arrogance, our indifference toward others. It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe..."

When I first read this, I cried. And that was feeling sorry for poor Danny. Now, I  don't cry but rejoice that I'm learning this.